shopify ecommerce and SEO Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is a term you’ve probably come across in your online marketing efforts. Everyone raves about SEO and how helpful it can be – and you know what? They’re right. Proper SEO is crucial to achieving pretty much every online marketing goal.

What is SEO – Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization deals with one metric in particular: and that is search result ranking. For example, when’s the last time you actually travelled to the second page of results while Googling something? … Exactly. That’s why ranking high when people search for things related to your business is critical to your online marketing efforts and to your business’s success. SEO is an effective way to drive organic traffic to your website without spending a lot of money on ads and social media advertising.

What is Shopify?

Many business owners opt to use an already established platform to host their business’s online storefront. One particularly attractive option for e-commerce businesses looking for a host platform is Shopify. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows you to set up and manage your online storefront on their domain. It is set up to accommodate and combine most aspects of running a business onto a single platform- such as social media, product management, inventory, payments and shipping- thus simplifying a very complicated process. Shopify attempts to provide you with as many tools as possible to set up and run a successful business on their platform. Any Shopify plan you purchase includes things like templates for websites, integrated payment processing to make your store feel trustworthy and easy to navigate, and tips and tricks on how to improve your online presence. The keyword here, though, is the word tools.

Shopify and SEO

There is a bit of confusion surrounding Shopify and the SEO they mention they provide. On their website, Shopify says that they provide SEO and marketing tools with all of their plans. Some people translate this as Shopify providing Search Engine Optimization services for your business– however that’s not exactly what Shopify is offering. Shopify SEO is more of a “how to” guide than an actual service. When Shopify mentions that it provides SEO and marketing tools, what they mean is that their platform supports SEO services and they also provide instructional content to help you perform the SEO services yourself. While Shopify has some select SEO features built into its domain that help streamline the SEO process, these features are usually the bare minimum and will not provide the best results without further work. Shopify offers a video course to guide you through how to optimize your storefront on their platform if you choose to do it yourself. However, instead of trying to teach yourself the bare minimum in order to perform SEO, your results could be optimized must faster and more effectively by hiring someone who knows what they are doing.

Why should you hire a professional for SEO services?

While Shopify’s SEO advice is very helpful to business owners looking to do the SEO themselves, there is only so much insight they can provide. They offer great pointers about three main areas of SEO that directly impact traffic to Shopify, namely Keyword Research, On-Site SEO, and Off-Site SEO. However, you must do a fair amount of research and guess-work in order to follow their advice. In the end, you can’t even be sure it will deliver the results you are after. Another thing to consider is that SEO is a long-term commitment; you cannot just perform SEO once and expect your website to consistently rank high on Google for the rest of eternity. Consistency is key, and it requires a lot of time investment should you choose to do the SEO yourself. In contrast, professional SEO services are just that: professional. These are very specific, tailored campaigns that employ different strategies depending on every unique client’s goals. Hiring a professional SEO service provider almost always leads to better results than doing it yourself. A professional has a lot more experience, insight, and tools available to them. Professional SEO service providers have multiple strategies they can implement to achieve stellar results. They also can predict what will work (and what will not) based on their experience in the field, and can dedicate the appropriate amount of time and energy in order to properly optimize your website traffic and conversions. Overall, Search Engine Optimization can make or break your online storefront. Shopify is a great platform that allows for SEO services to be performed directly onto your online storefront, however you have to actually perform those services yourself or hire a professional. Professional help can make an enormous difference when looking at your results over time. Contact the SEO professionals at KEY27 Marketing Oakville to improve the Search Engines Optimization of your Shopify website.